It was my first Christmas alone and my internal landscape was as bleak as leafless trees against a grey sky. There was no warmth or comfort that year.
The one thin thread that held me together was knowing that God was there—even though I couldn’t feel God, had no sense of being loved, no assurance at all of divine presence or care.
There was just one place where the gossamer that was God holding me together thickened into something stronger. It happened every night at bedtime. Just before I turned out my light, I would open my Bible to the Psalms. Years of Bible study had taught me well that the psalmist understood loss in all its forms. I knew I would not have to read long before finding words that expressed the cries of my heart.
“Day and night I have only tears for food …”
“My heart is breaking when I remember how it used to be …”
But I knew that as surely as I found words of grief, despair, fear and longing, I would also find words of comfort, encouragement and even hope.
“I will put my hope in God! I will praise Him again—my Saviour and my God!”
I couldn’t face the happy fellowship of church those days, especially during the weeks leading up to Christmas. I didn’t know what to say to people and often people didn’t know what to say to me.
But on Christmas Eve, I decided to risk going to a service.
I arrived late, eluded greeters, slipped into a seat near the back and huddled there for the first part of the service.
I managed alright through the story – telling carols: It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, The First Noel, While Shepherds Watched their Flocks. But the one that did me in was Joy to the World. A trumpet was leading. The sound was so bright … powerful … exuberant! The sheer, bold joy of it broke my heart with both joy and sorrow.
As the singing swelled, my spirit leapt to the reality of new life and hope because of this baby born so long ago, who lived and died to show God’s love to the less – than – whole—a category that definitely included me. I could feel the energy in the room, the moving of the Spirit.
But it was too much. I wasn’t able to receive it in such intensity. Like my mother who wore sunglasses in the house after her eye surgery, I couldn’t tolerate the strength of light present at that moment. It was exquisitely beautiful, but too painful.
Loneliness washed over me, then anger. My jaw ached as I tried to hold back tears. Then I let them flow. There was no stopping the sobs that shook my body. I left and headed to my car.
I cried then for the beauty of God – made – man, for the hope that sustains when there is nothing else. I cried for the sadness, for love lost, my life forever changed. I cried for my lack of strength and my lack of faith. I cried because those people back at the church had the joy that I couldn’t manage. I cried for the pain that seemed beyond enduring. I cried because my loss was a filter that kept out the comfort of God.
I cried because in that church were people who still had all that I’d lost. And often they didn’t seem to appreciate it. That made me angry.
But in the end I cried because I knew that the hope there was real and true and present. And I knew, in spite of the loss that filled my whole lens, one day I would feel it again.
I remember years ago stepping outside the back door of an old, brick farmhouse. A storm had passed and the snowy yard lay bright in the silver light of a quarter moon.
The cold stillness was almost a sound, the silence an echo.
The drape of white made a mound of the daphne bush beside the gate. Pristine. Tidy. But that smooth orb contained an uncountable number of tiny snowflakes. How was it possible for those little bits of snow to cover a three – foot shrub? What kept them from falling between the dry, brown leaves onto the ground?
And then there was the sky. The Milky Way scattered brightness across the centre, a contrast to the deep black spaces between the stars on either side.
Did those same stars shine on the grains of sand in the desert where the wise men plodded along on their way to see Jesus? Did they gleam on blue and red of turbans, copper, brass and silver of the camels’ harnesses and saddles?
Those stars, the same then as now. Long ago. Far away. But the same.
And beyond them is the mystery of God, who formed them, who knows them, who calls them by name.
How does earth fit into the scale of the universe? Is it the equivalent of one little snowflake, one grain of sand? And if the earth is one little snowflake, what are we? And how wondrous it is that He chose to become one of us—the Creator becoming microscopic in His own universe.
The stars sang when the earth was born. They must have been singing when Jesus was born. Back – up choir for the angels. They were likely still singing as the shepherds pelted down the path to Bethlehem, but their song was drowned out by the thud of feet on the hard earth and the gasps of men not used to running.
It was a long time ago that I stood outside that old farmhouse, when I looked at stars that winked through the deep darkness. I remember that just before the tingle in my fingers sent me back into the house, I heard them. Just for a moment, I heard the stars sing.
